(Note: Omori spoilers contained within. Don't read onward if you don't want to be spoiled.)

What do you usually do after finishing a game? The most likely answers are either to play it again, perhaps seeking achievements or new endings, or to simply put it down and move on to the next one that's caught your eye. However, I think most of us have had a small thought in the back of our minds before - what if it didn't have to end? What if you could just keep experiencing this world you've grown to love without having to reset it again and again? The obvious rebuttal is games that don't necessarily have an ending and are meant to be played as long as the player wishes, but some also want a more guided experience - to finish a main story-guided game and then just keep playing. This is most commonly referred to as a "postgame".

For the sake of this article, we'll be avoiding games with minimal postgames, or where their "postgame" content can be accessed before the game is over; the Mario series is a perfect example of this, where the various special worlds in the mainline games are used more as a reward for dedicated completionists. What we'll focus on instead are Japanese-style RPGs, games renowned for their storylines and complex gameplay, and the various attempts to create postgames for a game genre that, by its nature, follows a set line that you can't truly deviate from.

The first example I'd like to bring up is the Pokemon games. What's a trainer to do once they've acquired every gym badge and become the champion of their entire region? Now, there's a number of obvious things to do for a postgame in a Pokemon game: you can expand your Pokedex, of course, level your Pokemon even higher, try and catch legendary Pokemon, or perhaps even take on some kind of area or challenge to test your team composition. Unless you're really interested in those types of battle challenges, though, you will run out of things to do: there are generally only a small handful of legendary Pokemon to snag, completing the Pokedex is impossible in most entries without friends to trade with or glitches, and leveling up past the point of the Pokemon League typically feels pointless since you've already proven you're strong enough for the toughest challenge the game truly has to offer. The second and third generation games actually showcase this in an interesting way - in both games, you can battle a former champion, Red in the second generation's case and Steven Stone in the third generation's case. While I'm not as knowledgeable about Steven Stone, Red feels like a commentary on this very thing. He's the canonical protagonist of the first generation Pokemon games, and he's done everything - he's caught them all, leveled well past the point of anything being able to give him any real challenge, and completed everything Kanto has to offer him. As a result, you find him isolating himself on top of a mountain, where he just wordlessly battles you.

The second example I can think of would be Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones. Its claim to fame is being the first game in the Fire Emblem series that lets you grind at will, giving you access to the Tower of Valni and its armies of pathetic zombies that almost any unit can clear. The Tower of Valni and the later-unlocked Lagdou Ruins are both intended to be finished after completing the main game - the Tower of Valni isn't particularly difficult, but the Lagdou Ruins is designed to challenge high-level groups of promoted units. The existence of the postgame, though, feels almost like it goes against the tone of the game and its ending - it feels like there's some kind of hope, some kind of future for the continent of Magvel, free of the tides of monsters covering its surface and infesting its every corner. If you go by the postgame, though, that's not the case. Not only do you have the Tower of Valni and Lagdou Ruins filled with infinitely-respawning groups of monsters, but groups of monsters appear and block your way in a variety of locations all around the continent. These places were once safe, and yet no matter what you do, you can't ever actually eradicate the plague of monsters infesting Magvel, even after you've slain the Demon King.

The third answer is an example that people might be worried about spoilers for, and an example that does so intentionally: Omori. The game's Headspace areas are where the traditional RPG gameplay occurs - no matter what path you take, you'll have numerous main dungeons to go through, ranging from the moon to an egotistical magical girl's castle to the inside of a whale. However, after that last dungeon, events diverge massively depending on your storyline path. On the main route, you'll force Sunny to look into himself and face the truth no matter how much it hurts, leaving Headspace and the comforting lie it provides behind to finally resolve the intense guilt he's felt for years. On the hikikomori route, though, you do the exact opposite - Sunny will throw away any possibility of discovering the truth, retreating into Headspace one more time and reinforcing the comforting lie of nothing going wrong, enjoying amazing adventures with his friends. This is the route that gives you a postgame - you can end the game at any time after dealing with Black Space, but there's a lot of additional content to explore in Headspace on this route, including multiple new areas with story developments not present in the main route and a boss rush. However, once you finally finish everything you want to do and go to end the game, you're locked into the game's most unsatisfying ending branches - after all, you didn't resolve any of the actual problems Sunny dealt with. You did plenty within his dreamy headspace, of course, but the truth will remain buried forever, and the intense guilt will follow him as long as he lives (which it's implied likely won't be too long). This is an example of postgame ennui being used intentionally to a game's advantage - you gain more things to do, far more, but at the cost of not truly resolving the game's real story.

In closing, I hope I've done a good job demonstrating my point. Postgames are nice - having more things to do is greatly appreciated, of course - but eventually, you will run into the problem of running out of things to do having to leave the game without a truly satisfying ending to go along with it. It sometimes goes against what you'd hope the ending would bring. Sometimes, games may even use it intentionally to aid the storyline they're trying to tell. In the end, though, everything has to end eventually - whether it's the game giving you a big, bold "THE END" screen, or you simply running out of things you want to do and putting it down.